Faculty Spotlight

Alexander W.E. Franz

Alexander Franz, PhD won the 2014 award for best paper in the journal Insect Molecular Biology. Sponsored by the Royal Entomological Society, the award recognizes the best paper over a two-year period. The paper, “Transgene-mediated suppression of the RNA interference pathway in Aedes aegypti interferes with gene silencing and enhances Sindbis virus and dengue virus type 2 replication”. More recently, his laboratory was the first to report the use of CRISPR/Cas9 for genome editing in the mosquito vector, Aedes aegypti (PLoS One. 2015 Mar 27;10(3):e0122353. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0122353. eCollection 2015).